The captain chuckled, refueled his pipe and continued: “The boy told me things began to look pretty bad in England. No one wanted to finance his inventions, least of all his father, who decided his son wasn’t as bright as he had hoped. What broadcasting was being done was purely experimental, so that there seemed little chance of financial success from his idea.
“The upshot was that his father promised to cut off his allowance if he didn’t go to work—all the big electrical corporations refused to meddle with the thing, and, as a last straw, the girl in the case—oh, yes, there was one—sided with his father.
“That’s about all, except that since no one had confidence in him—since his sweetheart didn’t love him for himself alone—he got very tearful at this point—he decided to come to darkest Africa and romantically go to hell in a hurry, principally, of course, so that the girl would realize her mistake too late. He got a position with the African Produce Association—was made an agent, in fact, due perhaps to father’s influence, and came out prepared to cut all the corners.
“ ‘You see,’ he explained, looking at me owlishly. ‘I’d read so much about what the tropics do to a man—how unless he’s made of steel they will wreck him within a year or so, no matter how he fights. Well, I just thought it would be interesting to cut out the preliminaries. Go the whole route, as you might say, at once, and have it over with.’
“With that he lapsed from tears into slumber and I departed, feeling a wee bit old and helpless—wishing there were some way of shaking him out of his romantic notions and back into reality. But what can a man do when a boy gets it into his head to kill himself.”
“And I thought the same thing during the next few months,” groaned MacAllister. “Things went from bad to worse. Oh, the station went along fairly well, with everything running smoothly and the oil coming in regularly. Markley, in the mornings before he had a chance to get too soused, did what little work there was for him to do, well enough, but the rest of the time he would sit on the veranda, swilling liquor in a manner I never thought possible. What a constitution he must have had! I could have sworn he hated the stuff, but was drinking it on some kind of bet with himself. In a way things got as bad as they did later when Timmy Smith came, and yet again they didn’t. Markley wouldn’t allow the boys to loaf. He made them keep the bungalow and compound reasonably clean, and he kept all his socks under lock and key because he had read somewhere that the native cooks particularly prize them as coffee strainers. After that woman came—her native name was Eta something or other—he made her keep his quarters spick and span clean, and I’ll have to admit she did it well. But he drank day and night. It got so that he was just one jump ahead of D. T.’s, and I can’t help feeling that he was betting with himself just how long it would take him to achieve them.
“His only diversion was the radio. He never tired of it. Used to take Eta down to the shack and amuse himself trying to explain the workings of the set to her in a mixture of pidgin and mission English.
“One day he called in all the natives about the place, including a number of canoemen from upriver, and explained that the shack concealed the white man’s God, whose voice they heard. No harm, he declared, could come to those under the protection thereof. Blasphemy it was, and myself a good Presbyterian. I remember Markley was especially drunk that day. His eyes were burning and his hands shook. Hanging onto a chair with one hand, gesticulating wildly with the other, he made a speech to the natives in such an amazing mixture of English, Latin and pidgin as must have rivaled the gibberish of their own witch doctors.
“About a week after that a runner from King Tolo appeared at the station with a message. Now Tolo, as you know, is an imperialist with the idea that he owns a large per cent of the Niger. He has no more love for the English than they have for him, but he just manages to keep inside the deadline. The message was written by some mission-bred negro who had drawn it up in what he conceived to be strictly legal form, with such a sprinkling of “hereinbefores” and “whereas’s” as to make the muggy paper almost unintelligible. After we had deciphered it, it became apparent that King Tolo was greatly hurt and grieved—that one Eta, a cousin of the king—now residing with the agent at Maraban, one Charles Markley—had been married without the knowledge or consent of the aforesaid Tolo, or worse yet, that she had never been married. Now, therefore, the said Tolo demanded as his rightful marriage portion, the following, to wit: A list which included, among other impossible things, a case of whisky and two rifles.
“Markley laughed for the first time since he had been in Maraban when he got the gist of it, and his yellow, dulled eyes seemed to brighten a little. It was his first show of human feelings in about eight months. He immediately translated the message to Eta, getting quite appreciative over the fact that the thirty-second cousin of King Tolo was worth two Mauser rifles.